Chronicles: Medieval Is a Gloriously Complicated Strategy Game — and It's Not Done Yet

Chronicles: Medieval showed up at gamescom 2026 with a 30-minute demo that made one thing immediately clear: Raw Power Games is building one of the most detail-obsessed medieval strategy games in recent memory. It's heading into Early Access before a full 1.0 launch, and the rough edges are already visible — but so is the ambition.

The game covers The Hundred Years' War and lets you command one of three factions: Britain, France, or the Holy Roman Empire. The overworld Exploration map spans 209 regions, each with at least one settlement and a castle, plus dynamic points of interest like bandit camps, mercenary hire opportunities, and trade routes. Battles play out as large-scale Total War-style engagements where troop positioning, real-time command adjustments, and equipment choices — the right weapons against heavy cavalry, shields that can survive arrow volleys — all matter. You can also drop down from the commander view into a third-person action mode and fight directly on the battlefield, which the preview singled out as a genuine highlight. Raw Power Games even demoed a mounted commander swinging a polearm, noting that historical accuracy is a priority but not a cage — if you want to do something a bit unorthodox, the game lets you.

Chronicles: Medieval sits in a crowded but passionate niche. Games like Total War, Mount & Blade, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance have all carved out audiences who want medieval combat taken seriously, and Chronicles is clearly pitching to that same crowd — the ones who will happily spend an hour in a pre-battle equipment screen. The combination of RPG progression, third-person action, and grand strategy layered on top of each other is genuinely unusual, and the historical detail — coats of arms rooted in real heraldry, period-accurate unit compositions — suggests Raw Power Games has done its homework.

The preview's verdict is cautiously enthusiastic but honest: there's a lot of cool stuff here, and the scale of the battles is impressive, but anyone jumping in at Early Access should expect an unfinished product. The full 1.0 release is still a ways off, and Chronicles: Medieval is one to watch rather than one to buy right now.